BrowserUk has asked for the
wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

In a recent post I described a method I discovered for packing hashes and arrays. As part of the description, I typed a few examples into my REPL and pasted the output in the post; 10 lines of sample code being worth a 1000 words of verbiage.

But I just realised that I made a typo. Instead of using a template of n/(n/a*)*, I accidentally omitted the final *. But the mystery is, it still worked: